Digital ink is becoming an important media for users to interact with computer applications. However, traditional search technologies are usually based on text, not on digital ink.
While text-based searching is often valuable, there are many kinds of data and information that cannot be described accurately and/or easily by text, such as shapes and sketches. For example, consider a user that wants to find a certain shape from a program's shape repository. The user may not know the program's text name for the shape, and thus may have trouble finding that shape, even though the user can easily sketch a similar shape easily with digital ink. Similarly, a sketch or other image/picture (e.g., a Word Art item) may be found via a text search with the appropriate text, but if the needed text is not known or intuitive to a user, a text search is not an effective way to find what the user wants.